A sweet concoction

Let's just say 3+ years ago... back in undergrad I remember hanging out with friends in our dorm rooms drinking Smirnoff Ice. My favorite was the green apple flavor. One night our party had snacks, in particular skittles and I thought, my Smirnoff Ice is green apple flavor, and I have green skittles they must go together! And thus I found not only could did It turn the drink green but it also made it a bit sweeter which always worked for me. After surfing around on the internet I found out I'm not the only person to want to mix skittles and alcohol. I found this wonderful tutorial on how to extract the wonderful skittle color and flavor into vodka.

So the first thing I did was go to Sams Club and bought the 54oz bag of skittles for about $5.75. This ended up being way to much for the amount needed for the recipe however I had a blast separating the colors.





 


My favorite skittles are the purple ones but those are the fewest in the bag I got. However I ended up with over 250 skittles of each color, over 300 for some of them.








Since I did this in advance I placed the skittles in separate baggies and put them in the refrigerator.



Next I decided to buy small glass bottles of vodka. This way I could use them for the final product and not have to purchase glass bottles separately. I got 100ml bottles which is just under 3.5 oz. I figure I can make small batches of each of the flavors and then once I decide my favorite flavors I can make larger batches of the ones I like. Each bottle was $2.50 where the larger bottles were $5.00 each. So for these I spent a total of $12.50 plus tax.




I tore off the labels so that I'll just end with clear bottles filled with nicely colored liquid.

I also bought a set of 6 water bottles for $2 and took the labels off of them in order to see the color inside more clearly. I figure I can just pour the water into a glass and drink it that way I don't waste the water. (A great way to get your 10 glasses of water for the day)



I used a paper towel to dry the inside of the bottles. I used a crayon to label the tops of each the water bottles corresponding to the skittle color. This way I can just keep the water bottles for the next batch.

Next I used a funnel to transfer the vodka from the glass bottles into the water bottles and used a scale to determine that each bottle is about 3.2oz so I put in about 35 skittles of each color into each bottle (the calculation in the recipe says about 10 per ounce however I figure a few extra can't hurt).


Without even shaking the color coating comes off the skittles however for good measure I gave each bottle a good shake and let it sit overnight and into the next day. I think the small amount of liquid made it difficult to have the skittles dissolve.

Next I used coffee filters (as suggested) to filter the mixture. Not all of the skittles dissolved but most did.

I initially used about 3 filters for each batch. It was taking quite a bit of time to filter (and i may not be the most patient person..) So i squeezed the filter to get the rest out. This turned out to be not the best idea because the vodka came out thicker then necessary.

I started with the purple, then green then orange. By the time I got to red I decided the better method would be to get a plastic fork to scrape the bottom of the filter to move over the gummy residue from the skittles.
This worked quite a bit better and the red and yellow came out much clearer than the first three. I then went back and repeated the process with the first 3.

I wasn't able to fit all of the vodka back in the jars, so I lost maybe about a total of 0.2 ounces.

Over all they came out very pretty and I can't wait to try them after my exam :)